Liberals are portraying the Tea Party movement as fostering violence and sedition. During a recent appearance on NBC's "The Chris Matthews Show," Time columnist Joe Klein said that much of the heated political rhetoric, "especially the [statements] coming from people like Glenn Beck and to a certain extent Sarah Palin, rub right up close to being seditious."

Of course, sedition is a crime. It is the revolt or inciting of revolt against the authority of the government. Mr. Klein's message was clear: Conservative critics of President Obama are committing treason, especially the Tea Partiers who express their disapproval through rallies and protests.

Not to be outdone, former President Bill Clinton seized on the 15th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing to compare Tea Party participants to potential Timothy McVeighs.

"Have at it, go fight, go do whatever you want," Mr. Clinton said in a speech. "You don't have to be nice; you can be harsh. But you've got to be very careful not to advocate violence or cross the line."

In an Op-Ed column in the New York Times, he wrote: "There is a big difference between criticizing a policy or a politician and demonizing the government."

The comments from Mr. Klein and Mr. Clinton are disconnected from reality. The men are either ignoramuses or cheap propagandists, deliberately smearing Tea Party activists. The Tea Party movement has been peaceful and law-abiding. It is a public manifestation of anger at Mr. Obama's unprecedented expansion of government power. This legal, nonviolent freedom of association is as American as mom and apple pie.

The charges against Tea Partiers are not only false, but brazenly hypocritical. During the presidency of George W. Bush, the left's mantra was "Dissent is the highest form of patriotism." Apparently, that only applies when a Republican occupies the White_House.(continued)

Get’s better. Today Matthews did a end of program special comment about how negative ads are bad for democracy. But in 2005-2008 his show was one endless negative ad against republicans, and then he voiced no concern about the ‘Shadow Party’s” negative ads against republicans. Then it was democracy.

This guy is a complete phony.

5
posted on 04/22/2010 7:12:58 PM PDT
by sickoflibs
( "It's not the taxes, the redistribution is the federal spending=taxes delayed")

I recall all too well the seditious, undermining of the fifth column American left that occured between 2000 and 2008 when they led us down this self-destructive path. Where was the outrage then? You reap what you sow.

Moreover, the antiwar left engaged in hateful vitriol that makes Tea Party rallies seem like Sunday picnics. Mr. Bush routinely was compared to Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler. He was denounced as a war criminal. Code Pink protesters held up signs urging that Mr. Bush be shot. He was slandered regularly as a liar, imperialist and fascist. The left's narrative was that the Republican Party had erected a right-wing military junta: "Bush-Cheney-Hitler-Halliburton" was the antiwar movement's cry. "Bush lied, people died," was another slogan. It was not conservatives, but Bush-bashing progressives who espoused incendiary, violent rhetoric.

Mr. Klein and Mr. Clinton were silent when Hollywood demonized Mr. Bush - for example, in Michael Moore's despicable and patently mendacious film, "Fahrenheit 9/11." They were silent when former Vice President Al Gore claimed Mr. Bush had "betrayed this country."

This information should be trumpeted every time the Obamabots whine that the Tea Partiers are mean and nasty to their god.

Bush was demonized as no American President has been in our lifetime. There were posters of his head in a basket with a guillotine above, and no one minded.

And yet if we see Obama as "The Joker" on a poster (actually originated by a Dem, btw), they cry and complain.

"Have at it, go fight, go do whatever you want," Mr. Clinton said in a speech. "You don't have to be nice; you can be harsh. But you've got to be very careful not to advocate violence or cross the line."

["Have at it, go fight, go do whatever you want," Mr. Clinton said in a speech. "You don't have to be nice; you can be harsh. But you've got to be very careful not to advocate violence or cross the line." ]

The irony is that those who are establishing collectivism in America are accusing the individualists of racism, whereas, as this article shows, racism in a society increases in direct proportion to the amount of the collectivism imposed upon it and inversely with the amount of individualism protected. After all, if groupism is the main criteria for identifying people, skin color is the easiest one that people with limitations or handicaps in their ability to understand the world can cope with.

Historically, racism has always risen or fallen with the rise or fall of collectivism.Collectivism holds that the individual has no rights, that his life and work belong to the group (to "society," to the tribe, the state, the nation) and that the group may sacrifice him at its own whim to its own interests. The only way to implement a doctrine of that kind is by means of brute force -- and statism has always been the poltical corollary of collectivism.

The absolute state is merely an institutionalized form of gang rule, regardless of which particular gang seizes power. And -- since there is no rational justification for such rule, since none has ever been or can ever be offered -- the mystique of racism is a crucial element in every variant of the absolute state. The relationship is reciprocal: statism rises out of prehistorical tribal warfare, out of the notion that the men of one tribe are the natural prey for the men of another -- and establishes its own internal sub-categories of racism, a system of castes determined by a man's birth, such as inherited titles of nobility or inherited serfdom.

The racism of Nazi Germany -- where men had to fill questionnaires about their ancestry for generations back, in order to prove their "Aryan" descent -- has its counterpart in Soviet Russia, where men had to fill similar questionnaires to show that their ancestors had owned no property and thus to prove their "proletarian" descent. The Soviet ideology rest on the notion that men can be conditioned to communism genetically -- that is, that a few generations conditioned by dictatorship will transmit communist ideology to their descendants, who will be communists at birth. The persecution of racial minorities in Soviet Russia, according to the racial descent and whim of any given commissar, is a matter of record; anti-semitism is particularly prevalent -- only the official pogroms are now called "political purges."

There is only one antidote to racism: the philosophy of individualism and its politico-economic corollary, laissez-faire capitalism.

Individualism regards man -- every man -- as an independent, sovereign entity who possesses an inalienable right to his own life, a right derived from his nature as a rational being. Individualism holds that a civilized society, or any form of association, cooperation or peaceful co-existence among men, can be achieved only on the basis of the recognition of individual rights -- and that a group, as such, has no rights other than the individual rights of its members.

It is not a man's ancestors or relatives or genes or body chemistry that count in a free market, but only one human attribute: productive ability. It is by his own individual ability and ambition that capitalism judges a man and rewards him accordingly.

No political system can establish universal rationality by law (or by force). But capitalism is the only system that functions in a way which rewards rationality and penalizes all forms of irrationality, including racism.

A fully free, capitalist system has not yet existed anywhere. But what is enormously significant is the correlation of racism and political controls in the semi-free economies of the 19th century. Racial and/or religious persecutions of minorities stood in inverse ratio to the degree of a country's freedom. Racism was strongest in the more controlled economies, such as Russia and Germany -- and weakest in England, the then freest country of Europe.

-- excerpted from the article "Racism" by Ayn Rand, published in the September, 1963 issue of The Objectivist Newsletter, excerpts of which can be found HERE.

"The left attempts to brand us tea party patriots as haters, while in reality they are the ones spewing hate from deep within their souls." -- Lloyd Marcus, April 2nd, 2010 here: http://www.lloydmarcus.com/

Just what is crossing the line to BillyJeff?
Good Waco reminder.
Remember Alamo Girl’s list of the dead? Seems that bodyguards and fundraisers had a high death rate. Some dead at Waco; some at Murrah building.

Be careful quoting Ayn Rand. I’ve been called a communist by Freepers for posting her quote that states “Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue” and “If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject”.

All because I argued that anyone employed by a company should be paid the free-market value of their work. They thought that a communist idea. And that companies should have the option to hire people, actual new hires, not volunteers... and not pay them.

Here at the Free Republic, we have supposed conservatives that call Rand a friggin’ communist! Sheesh!

Disclaimer:
Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual
posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its
management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the
exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.